On the Trail of the Master of Liesborn

On September 20 (see page 54 of Gazette No. 31), Daguerre Auctions successfully sold off the contents of the Château de Meillant. At that time, the auction house decided to set aside these four panels— The Arrest of Christ, The Crowning with Thorns, The Ascension, and Pentecost —for a later auction specializing in old master paintings. Part of a large altarpiece dedicated to the Passion of Christ, which likely consisted of twelve or thirteen panels, the four works were attributed by the expert to the corpus of the Master of Liesborn, a painter active in Westphalia during the second half of the 15th century. This is an anonymous artist whose conventional name derives, as is often the case, from his most significant work: the altarpiece of the high altar in the church of the Benedictine monastery